Hostage situation averted in Imperial Beach

Elderly man escapes to tell police of intruder

At approximately 7:30 a.m. on Friday, June 21, residents in an apartment complex in the 1400 block of 14th Street in Imperial Beach heard their neighbors yelling and screaming and called 911.

The responding sheriff’s deputy approached a suspect, who hit him and ran off. As the sheriff’s helicopter circled over the scene telling residents they were looking for a Hispanic male six feet tall with tattoos all over his body, the suspect had knocked on the door of an elderly male in a condo complex a block away in the 1300 block of Holly Avenue.

The elderly man, identified only as Bill, answered a knock at his door of his second-floor condo and the suspect pushed his way in. Bill described the man as nervous but unarmed. He gave him water as the man wrote a note to his daughter in case, Bill said he told him, “he was killed.”

Deputies were doing a house-to-house search when the man saw them from a window and barricaded himself in Bill’s bedroom, giving Bill the chance to escape and alert deputies.

As deputies evacuated the complex, the man broke a window and started throwing items into the parking lot. At this time, the sheriff's special enforcement detail and crisis negotiation team were called to the scene and the SWAT team surrounded the complex and closed the surrounding streets.

Negotiators made contact with the suspect’s relatives, who helped authorities talk to him for more than two hours before he surrendered peacefully shortly after 11:30 am.